First, a huge thank you to all the people who donated to us in the past 2 months! As you know our Platinum sponsorship from Blue Systems came to an end and so will our Gold sponsorship with Opera at the end of this year. Losing our two main sponsors is tough, and we hope to find new sponsors going forward, but the support you’re giving us with your donations is amazing. Between September and October more than 400 people donated to Linux Mint. We made adjustments for 2014 but we’re also stronger than ever, as ambitious as before and we’re very confident about the future.

We didn’t communicate much lately and I have 271 unread emails in my inbox (if you wrote to me please accept my apologies for the delay, I can’t guarantee I’ll reply to every single email, but they will all get read)…. the good news, is that we’ve been working really hard and achieving fantastic results and it’s this time of year when we’re ready to share it out with you.

The Cinnamon and MATE editions of Linux Mint 16 “Petra” were approved today, shipping the latest Cinnamon 2.0 and MATE 1.6 desktop environments. They will be available as RC (Release Candidates) on the 15th of November. Their stable release is planned for the end of the month.

The KDE and Xfce editions entered QA this week and will follow shortly after.

The improvements featured in Linux Mint 16 as well as the latest MATE and Cinnamon desktops will be backported to LMDE and Linux Mint 13 in December.

Linux Mint related news:

If you’re in the USA, you can now order the mintBox 2 straight from Amazon (same price, but with free shipping and no customs): MintBox 2 on Amazon US

Andrew Gregory, Mike Saunders and Ben Everard left Linux Format to dedicate themselves to the creation of a new magazine. Linux Voice plans to give 50% of its profits back to the community and release its articles under Creative Commons 9 months after their publication. You can help with the crowd-funding at http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/linux-voice. If this happens and it creates a source of CC licensed articles of the same quality as the ones we enjoy from Linux Format, we’ll consider developing a newsstand application for Linux Mint.